We discuss the development of the revised printing of Flash Duel. Flash Duel is a simple and fast card game that in high level play ended up being bogged down by lengthy calculations. We talk about the design changes that address this as well as at least one tricky balance puzzle we faced.

At the time of this post, Flash Duel is on kickstarter right now. Please support it if you can.

We discuss the development of Pandante's expansion and 2nd edition. All three of us were involved in this development and playtesting. The core game has simplified and streamlined rules and we go through each one and explain why we made these changes. We also cover all the new (optional) content and what it adds to the game.

We discuss the drama created by stories that pose moral questions. Stories set outside the law make us think even more about these questions, so that could explain why so many popular stories have settings that take us outside of our familiar system of laws. We tie this into games with examples from The Walking Dead game and A Tale in the Desert.

We discuss sequels to movies and games. Sequel can mean a lot of different kinds of things, so we sort out the different kinds of sequels. This leads up to a discussion about how to handle sequels in highly replayable games.

In this episode, we discuss the many problems with games where players ban each other's characters. We touch on League of Legends, DOTA2, and Heroes of the Storm, though this discussion is applicable to any form of in-game banning in any game.

We discuss the Street Fighter 5 trailer as well as the games we're playing now: Super Mario 3D World, Smash Bros. 4, Transistor, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Sirlin gives an award for worst menus in a game while Aphotix gushes about a shooter.

In this episode, we discuss the kind of things that go wrong when creating rules for a tournament. The rules for high profile tournaments are sometimes surprisingly bad, yet even when we avoid the obvious problems, it's still very difficult to make completely fair rules. Sirlin explains the rules he chose for his own games as well.

Special guest Garcia1000 and Sirlin discuss the curious case of Nintendo.

In this episode, we discuss uneven playfields in competitive games. That's when a competitive game gives some players a material advantage, rather than being fair. Although fairness should be a basic premise of a competitive game, MOST competitive games have unfortunately become uneven playfields, and players seem to accept this. That's tragic to Sirlin and Aphotix.

Garcia1000 explains that his friends like kingmaker and collusion in games, which are usually considered bad properties.